ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more closely at two of the most important strands of current debates about technological innovation; its likely impact on the types and levels of skills amongst the workforce, and its impact on managerial strategies in the context of increasing organizational complexity. It also looks briefly at the ‘paradigmatic’ nature of microelectronics-based technologies in order to understand why it is that they have had such a profound and rapid impact on the labour process. One of the most influential attempts to explain the origins, and understand the pattern of development of the latest paradigm involves placing it in the context of previous clusters of innovation. Advocates of long-wave theory suggest that the levelling off of economic fortunes in the West during the 1970s, was closely associated with the maturation and subsequent decline of the mass-production oriented industrial paradigm of the fourth wave, and the emergence of the fifth wave based on microelectronics.
